I had been using i3 version of Manjaro for a few years now, being
quite happy with it. Everything seemed to work, and if something
wasn't working, there was the trusty Arch Linux Wiki. In a recent
upgrade, they removed the Nvidia driver for my old MacBook, so
it messed things up pretty bad as the open source driver I now
have to contend with is far inferior in terms of basic
functionality, like suspending and waking up. By the way, the
problem here is Nvidia, not Manjaro. Nvidia hates open source,
and wants new (and supposedly better) hardware cluttering the
world.
So, I went through a bunch of OSes trying to find something that
just worked. Once again, it seems that Mint won the round. I had
used Mint in the past before Arch. It seems much the way it was
back then, maybe five years ago. Stuff just works. The Nvidia
didn't, but for the same reason it doesn't work on Manjaro, I
suppose.
I felt a bit strange going back to Mint as the main OS, though,
so instead what I did was to install Mint on the better machine
and think of it as the machine I use only for the modern things
I may sometimes want to look at. Then, I installed Manjaro on the
Thinkpad T400 that I bought some time ago for tinkering. And on
the T400 I wanted to go deeper into the weirdo space. So as the
UI I am now running NsCDE, which is a bunch of customizations
to resurrect the Common Desktop Environment of the past millenium
but actually perfectly functional.
I must say, I am quite impressed with this setup. I can have my
cake and eat it too, as I have gone deeper into the la la land
of recent history but at the same time given myself the
permission to use some of the modern shit on the other machine.
These little innovations were inspired by the gopherspace,
but unfortunately I forgot who were responsible. There was the
idea of having a personal office with several different
workstations for different purposes. And someone was talking
about CDE, of which I had never heard of. Or not paid attention.
Oh, BTW, if you wonder, why would I change to Mint as the driver
didn't work on it either. Well, I liked my Manjaro system a lot.
I had it set up quite nicely for my use cases. I have no interest
in putting that effort on a computer that I am going to use on
things I find uninspiring, like going to one of these surveillance
platforms once in a while to see if there is some message I may
have to reply to. On the other hand, I am more interested in
investing some time and effort on the NsCDE / Manjaro system
which is more like a piece of art than a functional tool. So,
with Mint, I will actually do no customisation at all. The minimum
effort system. If I put Manjaro on the machine I would feel
tempted, and that would go against the bigger picture of keeping
these two things separated.
